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Are you concerned with optimised schedules that criss-cross along major roads?
For some of our clients, the optimum allocation of orders to vehicles and the optimum sequencing of those orders to take delivery windows into account is not enough - not unless the side of the road that each customer is on is also taken into consideration.
If the sequencing algorithms don’t allow for side of road, then an extreme example is that a vehicle could be scheduled to drive along busy streets like St Kilda and Parramatta Rds, miraculously doing deliveries on both sides while travelling in the one direction! This limitation of some routing systems is not obvious when you have a fairly low density of customers, but it becomes extremely obvious when you are trying to schedule, for example, the
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collection of mail from street posting boxes or deliveries of newspapers to corporate customers. Some operations don’t even allow u-turns in local streets, so the ideal side of road solution needs to work for smaller streets as well.
Now that we have a state-of-the-art GIS system, we have the ability to include this and other time and distance-related enhancements in Odyssey. I am, therefore, very pleased to announce that the latest version of Odyssey incorporates this functionality and we have already made a sale on this basis to a client who is now our beta tester.
Side of road works via a system of “crossing the road” penalties that can be customised to each operation. Limiting u-turns is likely to increase the kms travelled, so the complete exclusion of u-turns may not be appropriate for every operation. In fact, the aversion to u-turns is often linked with vehicle sizes and types, traffic levels and the speed in which the deliveries and/or collections need to be made. Some flexibility around the degree to which the penalties are implemented, if at all, is therefore required.
Nicola Williams
Managing Director
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